Pixel Droppings

But I feel like an asteroid. I feel like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. I was very, very guilty for years. I had to go to extensive therapy because I was like, “oh my god, I, Lochlan O'Neil, single-handedly destroyed fandom culture?”

She didn't she didn't she didn't. That wasn't it. She wasn't an asteroid.

She was the first skater that fell through the ice of Web 2.0.

I was also a teenager who found an amazing world, and My People, and friends I'd still talk to every day, on the internet. I spent years getting my mother to let me go to conventions and meet friends in distant cities. I started ambitious internet communities I didn't have the experience or skills to bring to fruition. I don't think there was a lot of difference between us, in a lot of ways. It's not that I was somehow smart or skilled or suave and she wasn't. She didn't have some awful planet-killing stink or velocity that she brought to the show.

The difference was this:

In 1994, when the Endless September began and the Internet felt perpetually full of stupid newbies, there were 20 million people online.

In 2001, when I got my first LiveJournal account, there were 500 million.

In 2012, when she joined Tumblr, there were 2.43 billion.

When I started out, and you joined a new messageboard or chatroom or mailing list, you had to introduce yourself to the community. Except in the biggest of websites, people expected to log onto the internet, read through all the new things that had been posted to their local bit of it, and then log off again. Older members took it upon themselves to greet the newbies and answer any questions they might have, directing them to the relevant community FAQs. People would say things like, "Oh yes, I remember you. This is only your second Thursday with us, right? I hope you have fun!"

I joined an Internet full of adults who got online through their jobs or their universities, one of the first wave of kids allowed to roam free. And the proportion of adults to kids kept steadily changing, but until DashCon, I don't think people understood how much. I remember a discussion that happened in early 2000s slash fandom, where the very true observation was made that in particular artistic ways, we had all agreed to suspend shame, which created a unique kind of space. As a community we could all admit that we were there to be embarrassingly enthusiastic in unusual ways about absolute nerd shit, and we understood that it wasn't life or death, it wasn't rocket surgery, but it also wasn't going to get broadcast onto the clouds and our bosses didn't know who we were. Everyone was (willing to act like) an adult, and we could hold the circle and create safety there.

That felt like a lot of geek spaces, then. Anime conventions, science fiction conventions, furry conventions, videogame stores, D&D meetups. Images were bulky and pixelated, video incredibly hard to move. When you got to a con, it was like a brief oasis of Weird that sheltered you and screened you from view, and you ended up volunteering because the weary, cynical, intelligent, kind people in the con ops office looked like you were throwing yourself in front of a bullet just for offering to run a clipboard down to the other end of the hotel for them.

The ice was thick enough to skate on. The circle was strong enough to let you be brave and funny and silly and free, and you could buckle down with some friends and clean all the trash out of the ballroom by 11am on Sunday, and you'd see everyone next year.

The bubble was going to burst, but nobody seemed to worry about it.

Things were changing fast for fans, all kinds of fans, in the early 2010s. Conventions that used to get news coverage like "Local Freaks Weird Out Hotel Employees: This Weekend Only" to "#Cosplay: The Hottest New Trend" and from Geocities sites that shut down if you exceeded your page visits for the month to AO3 getting 10 million pageviews a week.

It was great. We could conquer the world together. We could stay safe and together and the circle would hold.

And then the ice broke open and Lochlan fell through. Right through the bottom of that goddamn ballpit into freezing arctic sea. Right into years of people sorting through the churned ice of the wreck, taking years to come to the realization that there really had not been ANY goddamn adults in the room making sure things were okay. The community had not actually failed so much as never been formed in the first place.

Because as it turns out, group-bonding techniques that work for 100 or 1000 people do not work for 10,000. Or 100,000. Or one million. Or one billion.

That line about agreement to suspend shame sticks with me all these years after because the defining feature of post-Dashcon Tumblr has been shame. And scorn, contempt, derision, and hatred. Cringe, in short, and kys. Exactly the kind of bullshit I saw every day in junior high school, and ran to the Internet and fan conventions to get away from.

I got the kind of community and mentorship and support that have made fandom a refuge and a resource my whole life. Lochlan O'Neill didn't. Not because there was anything worse or dumber or less experienced about her.

Because a system built in the 1990s was incapable of bearing the stress of a load fifty times bigger than what was already "way too full."

Just because I'm from one generation, and she's from another.

How the fuck does this pass for anything but complete bullshit?

How is Mitch McConnell allowed to start another sentence? America and American media has lost the ability to see through made-up rhetoric.

So for every scientist with peer-supported empirical evidence regarding climate, Mitch can find some random asshole to say the opposite.

Anyone ever heard of “apples to apples”? 

Republicans are moral and ethical cowards, propped up by greedy donors and misogyny/racism.

McConnell won’t even put House Bills up for a vote.

TOMORROW (Jul 11), I’ll be at the Idler Festival in LONDON.

While the AI bubble is primarily a material phenomenon (driven by the calculation that bosses are easy marks for a sales pitch that sees them replacing workers with software), there is an inescapable ideological component to it: the desire for a world without people in it:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/13/vibe-governance/#k-hole

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/10/posthuman-as-in-no-humans/#hell-is-other-people

AI dangles the possibility of a world without ego-shattering confrontations between bosses who tell themselves they're in charge, and the workers who know how to do things and insist on telling bosses that their ideas are dangerous, illegal and/or unworkable:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism

A world without people might be lonely, but it sure would be convenient. How maddening it must be to invest billions in Amazon warehouse automation, only to have to slow down or (gasp!) stop the machines so that the workers who serve as "humans in the loop" can stop to pee! Isn't there some way we can make that their problem, not ours?

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/06/one-click-to-quit-the-union/#foxglove

With AI, the fact that you need to pee – or get paid – does become your problem, rather than your boss's. After the majority of your colleagues have been fired ("because AI will do their jobs"), you become painfully aware that there are plenty of people who need your job, who will happily step in to take it if you complain too much about your bladder or your paycheck.

Even better is when the "human in the loop" can be outsourced to a company overseas, which allows bosses to simply set-and-forget a set of requirements for how the human part of the AI's labor is to be done without ever having to meet or even think about those workers' conditions. This is the illusion of full automation, in which the AI does the job "like magic."

The "magic"? A human being stuck in AI Omelas, tormented by an algorithm that sets an inhuman pace, demands inhuman perfection, and metes out pitiless punishments for any misstep – or perceived misstep – without appeal or explanation. So often, "AI" stands for "Absent Indians": low-waged call-center workers pretending to be robots:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

There are many differences between jobs performed by machines and jobs performed by people, of course. But the biggest difference between a machine and a person is moral consideration. A person deserves and demands moral consideration: for their wellbeing, their feelings, even their bladders. A machine gets none of this: you can curse at it, kick it, snap out orders without a "please" or "thank you."

There's only one kind of person you get to treat like this: a slave.

Slavery is labor without even the pretense of moral consideration.

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We have released over a million images onto Flickr Commons for anyone to use, remix and repurpose. These images were taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books digitised by Microsoft who then generously gifted the scanned images to us, allowing us to release them back into the Public Domain. The images themselves cover a startling mix of subjects: There are maps, geological diagrams, beautiful illustrations, comical satire, illuminated and decorative letters, colourful illustrations, landscapes, wall-paintings and so much more that even we are not aware of.

It began with dehumanization.

Long before Jews were murdered, they were turned into an idea: the hidden enemy, the parasite, the conspirator behind every crisis.

Europe was already full of antisemitism before the war. Economic collapse, humiliation after World War I, fear of communism, and social chaos made people search for scapegoats. The Nazis gave them one.

To Nazi propaganda, Jews were “Judeo-Bolsheviks”. Communists. Capitalists. Globalists. Rootless elites. Somehow responsible for both capitalism and communism, both weakness and domination, both decadence and revolution.

The accusation never had to make sense.

It only had to make Jews seem dangerous enough to remove.

At first, Nazi policy focused on exclusion and expulsion: push Jews out of professions, universities, citizenship, public life, and eventually Europe itself.

But then Germany conquered more territory.

Poland brought millions more Jews under Nazi control. The invasion of the Soviet Union turned propaganda into mass shootings. In Ukraine, Jews were murdered in ravines like Babyn Yar, where more than 33,000 Jews were killed in two days. Local collaborators and auxiliary police helped identify, gather, guard, and murder Jews.

This is how genocide becomes scalable: records, police, railways, bureaucrats, neighbors, and silence.

Norway shows how fast it could happen when the state already knew who the Jews were. Authorities relied on police information, synagogue membership lists, statistical records, property inventories, and “J”-stamped identity cards. Once the decision came, Norwegian police helped arrest Jews for deportation.

Hungary shows another version. For years it had antisemitic laws and was allied with Nazi Germany, but mass deportations accelerated after Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944. In less than two months, about 435,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz, most murdered on arrival. Warnings arrived, including the Vrba-Wetzler report; action came only after hundreds of thousands had already been sent.

And yes, people knew.

The Allies had information by 1942 that Jews were being murdered en masse at Auschwitz. By 1944, the Vrba-Wetzler report gave one of the most detailed eyewitness descriptions of the gas chambers and crematoria. The world did not lack information. It lacked urgency.

Even the Red Cross failed the Jews.

Theresienstadt was staged by the Nazis as a “model ghetto” to deceive outsiders if they didn't bother to look hard enough. In 1944, the International Committee of the Red Cross visited, saw the performance, and issued a favorable report, not even noting an issue with forcing Jews into concentration camps in the first place. Even in April 1945, after other camps were being liberated, it continued to repeat it's erroneous findings.

That failure has an ugly echo today: Jewish civilians - women, children and Holocaust survivors were taken hostage by Hamas, hidden underground, suffered international starvation, sexual abuse and torture, and denied basic humanitarian access - while the same international institutions that speak endlessly about humanitarian law could not even force a visit, while insisting on visits for the armed terrorists who took the hostages.

But "Palestinians" also played an active role during the holocaust - The grand Mufti - Haj Amin al-Husseini was  not a mere footnote.

He met Hitler, allied himself with the Nazi project, recruited tens of thousands of Muslim soldiers to the SS, spread Nazi propaganda in the Arab world, opposed Jewish immigration to Palestine, and he repeatedly lobbied Nazi and Axis officials to block Jewish escape routes to Palestine - including transports involving Jewish children.

In 1943, he intervened against proposals to transfer Jews from Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania to Palestine after thousands of Jewish children had managed to reach safety. In 1944, he objected to certificates for 900 Jewish children from Hungary, warning that they might end up in Palestine and urging that, if they had to be removed, they be sent somewhere under “active control”, such as Poland - which, in 1944, meant the machinery of Nazi extermination.

And the world around the Nazis was not innocent.

There were righteous gentiles - brave people who risked everything to hide, smuggle, forge papers, and save Jews.

But there were also governments that collaborated, police forces that obeyed, bureaucrats who made lists, neighbors who informed, and countries that closed their doors.

Even Britain, while fighting Hitler, arrested thousands of German and Austrian “enemy aliens”, including Jewish refugees who had fled the Nazis, and shipped many of them to Australia on the HMT Dunera - alongside actual German and Italian POWs and Nazi sympathizers. Jews who escaped Nazi persecution were treated as enemy aliens together with the very people they had escaped from.

That is the uncomfortable lesson.

The Holocaust was carried out by Nazi Germany.

But it was made easier by a world that had already learned to treat Jews as a problem.

And that is why today’s language matters.

When Jews are again described as the hidden power behind everything - colonialism, capitalism, war, media, money, white supremacy, genocide - we should recognize the pattern.

Societies that blame Jews are usually confessing their own decay.

When Europe tried this before and blamed Jews for capitalism, communism, war, poverty, humiliation, and social collapse.

It did not save Europe.

It made Europe poorer, crueler, and morally disfigured.

Now the same disease is back with updated vocabulary: colonialism, whiteness, genocide, media, money, power.

When Israeli civilians and Jews are treated as legitimate targets, when hostages posters are ripped off poles, when Jewish safety concerns are mocked as propaganda, when terrorist murder is excused as “resistance”, when campuses and streets decide Jews are uniquely guilty - it is 1938, and 1939 comes next.

Now take this logic and apply it to things like ADHD, autism, clinical depression, and other less visible/divergent disabilities. You cannot think your way out of feeling.

Victim blaming and passive language benefit the abuser. Men rape. That's active langauge.

My response? Oh yes they would.

You think you’d be better off with a visible disability, but It’s really not any better. I was paralyzed at 15, and if you think people treat me better than when I was invisibly disabled, think again.

Adults with Down Syndrome fuck. Adults with Down Syndrome SAY fuck. Adults with Down Syndrome watch porn. Adults with Down Syndrome drink. Adults with Down Syndrome do dangerous things for the fun of it. Adults with Down Syndrome do stupid things.

Autistic adults fuck. Autistic adults SAY fuck. Autistic adults watch porn. Autistic adults drink. Autistic adults do dangerous things for the fun of it. Autistic adults do stupid things.

Adults with Cerebral Palsy fuck. Adults with Cerebral Palsy SAY fuck. Adults with Cerebral Palsy watch porn. Adults with Cerebral Palsy drink. Adults with Cerebral Palsy do dangerous things for the fun of it. Adults with Cerebral Palsy do stupid things.